This great Dilbert cartoon perfectly captures how surveillance breeds distrust.

The feds are spying on us left and right, and yet politicians whine that we don’t trust the government.

At least not everyone’s a damn fool on that regard. (No - this isn’t the cue to recite the Pledge of Allegiance….)

When the Washington Post’s Tom Toles is good, he’s great.

I’m disappointed that Obama will not be giving the speech after climbing out of a jet wearing a flight suit, like George W. did with his “Mission Accomplished” speech in 2003.

I expect that Obama will have at least half a dozen Montana-sized howlers in his speech tonight.

But will he out-BS Bush on Iraq?

Has anyone seen betting odds on this proposition? It will not be easy, considering that Bush spent 6 years shoveling hokum on Iraq.

On the other hand, Obama has embraced most of Bush’s follies. Perhaps he can rise to this challenge as well.

There’s a different 9/11 celebration going on in San Diego. Lawrence Ludlow emailed me about “Government Blowback Day.” I don’t know if Lawrence and his friends are planning to burn copies of the 9/11 Commission Report.

From the press release:

San Diego Complete Liberty Declares Sept. 11th “Government Blowback Day”

– Wear a black arm-band on September 11; tell the world you didn’t swallow the Big Lie —

SAN DIEGO, CA – September 6, 2010 – The San Diego “Complete Liberty Meetup” group joins other voluntaryists, private-property anarchists, and libertarians by declaring September 11th a day of remembrance: Government Blowback Day. This September 11, nine years will have passed since the price of the U.S. government’s meddling foreign policy was paid by innocent people. Despite the passing of time, gullible people still believe the Big Lie that was cooked up in the Washington, D.C. “lie factory” – namely, that the terrorists “hate us for our freedom.” What freedom? The spy cameras? Phone and email surveillance? The high taxes? The Patriot Act? The paranoia? The promise of endless wars and new terrorists to come? We are tired of the nonsense. On September 11, the first Government Blowback Day will remind the lunatics in Washington, D.C. that some of us know the real reasons for the attacks. The terrorists made no secret about why they attacked: (1) U.S. government support for the apartheid state of Israel, (2) the presence of U.S. armed forces in Islamic holy places, and (3) the U.S. sanctions that killed over 500,000 children in Iraq as of 1995 (and continued until Dubya started his “war on terror” that will never end with Obama).

September 11 is a day to remember the real cause of terrorism: the president, the congress, and their foreign policy

…..

This is one of the “crimes” that best illustrates the mirage of the Rule of Law in the U.S. FBI agents and chieftains can lie up and down, in court and out, and never sweat for a New York minute. But federal prosecutors and the federal statute book treat alleged false statements to FBI agents like some type of heresy that threatens the Republic.

Here’s a piece I did for Playboy back in May 1999 on this double standard.

Playboy May 1999
BEYOND PERJURY by James Bovard

Perhaps the greatest irony of the national debate over who should go to prison for lying has gone largely unreported: Even while President Bill Clinton fought for his reputation and job, his administration aggressively argued that Americans who make even the most offhand false comments to practically any government worker deserve harsh punishment.

Under Clinton’s watch, Congress amended the false statements statute in 1996 to ensure that people who make false statements during congressional testimony could be prosecuted.

The FBI academy in 1997 added a full training course on ethics for new recruits. According to the academy’s official syllabus, subjects of the bureau’s investigations have “forfeited their right to the truth.”

Federal agents have the right to lie to you-and to put you in prison if you lie to them. Any citizen who makes even a single-word false utterance (”no,” “yes”) to a federal agent faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The false statements law conveys so much power that, according to Solicitor General Seth Waxman, it could allow federal agents to “escalate completely innocent conduct into a felony.” One federal judge condemned the law for encouraging “inquisition as a method of criminal investigation.”

In 1998 the Supreme Court reinforced the power of federal agents when it upheld the conviction of New York union official James Brogan. He was surprised at home one evening by two investigators who asked him if he had received any cash or gifts from a real estate company whose employees were represented by his union. He answered no-which, the investigators knew, was false-and received a prison sentence for his one-word answer. (The jury also convicted Brogan of unlawfully receiving $150 in gratuities from the company-a misdemeanor.)

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in reviewing Brogan’s conviction, called attention to “the extraordinary authority Congress, perhaps unwittingly, has conferred on prosecutors to manufacture crimes.” Justice Ginsburg warned that the Supreme

Court’s decision will apply the federal law to encounters between federal agents and their targets “under extremely informal circumstances which do not sufficiently alert the person interviewed to the danger that false statements may lead to a felony conviction.” Ginsburg concluded that the broad interpretation of the law may result in “government generation of a crime when the underlying suspected wrongdoing is or has become nonpunishable.” In other words, you can be not guilty of a crime but guilty of lying about the same noncrime.

Unfortunately, federal agents use the powers granted by the false statements act far more often than most Americans realize. And they almost never warn you that a wrong single-word answer can earn you hard time.

For instance, if you smuggle in one Cuban cigar-and lie to a Customs inspector who asks what you purchased abroad-you could face two years in prison or a fine. Or, if you merely fail to complete a Customs declaration form, you could face felony charges for making a false statement.

If you question the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s position on air bags and apply for a switch to deactivate the device, you have to check off one or more state-approved reasons. You then have to certify that the statement you just made is “truthful, correct and complete to the best of your knowledge and belief” and acknowledge that if you make a false, fictitious or fraudulent statement you are subject to criminal prosecution.

If a taxpayer misreports his income by only a few hundred dollars, he can be fined or sent to prison for tax fraud. But if an IRS employee misrepresents federal tax law to jack up a citizen’s tax bill by thousands of dollars, he is not penalized.

Roughly 2 million Americans are audited each year; these audits generate almost $30 billion for the federal government.

How consistent are auditors in their misrepresentations? In 1996 the IRS Appeals Office found that almost 70 cents of each dollar of additional taxes that auditors demanded that year were unjustified. Is this a lie, or is it what poker players call a bluff?

Perjury is serious business. But failing to bare your soul to some federal employee who knocks on your door should be a different case. The core problem is that there are too many laws and too many government agents asking too many questions.

In his prime, and in his top notch writing, he was one of the best conservative stylists of the late 20th century. He gracefully combined earthiness and erudition to connect with Americans far and wide. When William F. Buckley passed away two years ago, pundits and obituary writers gushed over Buckley’s exquisite style. Kilpatrick’s style was far more potent and probably far more effective.

Kilpatrick’s The Writer’s Art was a fount of excellent ideas on style, and his The Foxes Union is one of the most vivid portrayals of the good life in rural Virginia.

There were plenty of issues on which I vigorously disagreed with him on, and I will make no excuse or defense for his championing of “Massive Resistance” in Virginia in the late 1950s. (The Washington Post obituary notes that he began his journalism career at the Richmond News Leader, where he championed the cause of a black shoeshine boy wrongfully convicted of shooting a policeman. Kilpatrick’s efforts led to a pardon).

But there were some issues on which he stunned me. When I was doing the research for Lost Rights in the early 1990s, Kilpatrick was one of the few conservatives who understood and treasured the Fourth Amendment. He vigorously opposed permitting government to conduct unreasonable, warrantless searches and he recognized how this profoundly changed the relation of State & Citizen. (I think that is a fair characterization of his position - my memory is dusty here). There were other issues on which Kilpatrick avoided the cravenness that too often characterized Washington pundits, both left and right, in recent decades.

UPDATE: LawHobbit* kindly sent me the following link on Kilpatrick’s horrible position on the Second Amendment. Geez, I never expected that he would be so wrongheaded on such a fundamental issue.

* A.K.A. Infamous Oregon Lawhobbit

Today’s Dilbert should cheer up American newspaper executives.

Is there any way to also get most federal agencies to go “web-only”?

BRINGING FREEDOM & PROSPERITY TO AFGHANISTAN
by James Bovard

The Obama administration is seeking to rechristen the Afghan debacle it inherited from the Bush administration. Obama’s efforts to legitimize the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan simply ignore the previous record of American actions in that nation. But the past debacles ensure the failure of Obama’s ramped-up interventions.

Afghanistan was recently judged to be the second most corrupt nation on Earth. According to Transparency International, the only place in the world that is more corrupt is Somalia — a nation best known for its pirates. The Washington Post reported last November that one of Afghanistan’s top ministers took a $30 million bribe to give a special deal to a Chinese mining company. The New York Times reported, “Everything seems to be for sale: public offices, access to government services, even a person’s freedom.”

And yet, Americans are supposed to believe that sending in more troops will morally redeem the Karzai regime. Unfortunately, that is the message that the American media often trumpet — following the White House script, the way they have done since 2001.

U.S. government handouts have enabled the Afghan government to increase repression of the Afghan people. The U.S. government has poured billions of dollars into building up the Afghan army. But Afghan soldiers are often a pox on their countrymen. Human Rights Watch reported that government

troops and police in many parts of the [southeast] region, and parts of Kabul itself, are invading private homes, usually at night, and robbing and assaulting civilians. By force or by ruse, soldiers and police gain entry into homes and hold people hostage for hours, terrorizing them with weapons, stealing their valuables, and sometimes raping women and girls. On the roads and at proliferating official and unofficial checkpoints, local soldiers and police extort money from civilians under the threat of beating or arrest.

U.S. aid is supposedly going to generate the prosperity that leads to Afghan freedom. And yet, even within a couple years after the U.S. invasion, foreign aid was floundering in Afghanistan, just as it almost always does elsewhere.

On December 16, 2003, dignitaries from the U.S. government, the Afghan provisional government, the United Nations, and other organizations gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. President Bush issued a statement from Washington bragging that

the first phase of paving the Kabul-Kandahar leg of the highway is completed under budget and ahead of schedule. This new road reduces travel time between Kabul to Kandahar to five hours. It will promote political unity between Afghanistan’s provinces, facilitate commerce by making it easier to bring products to market, and provide the Afghan people with greater access to health care and educational opportunities.

Though the announcement and the ceremony were widely portrayed in the U.S. media as a triumph for the Bush administration, the reality was less cheery. The Los Angeles Times reported that “it took hundreds of U.S. and Afghan troops, backed by attack helicopters, antitank weapons, snipers and bomb-sniffing dogs, to make it safe for President Hamid Karzai to cut the ribbon on the Kabul-to-Kandahar highway.” Prior to the signing ceremony, “troops set up roadblocks to stop traffic in both directions for more than three hours. That was just long enough for dignitaries to arrive in heavily guarded convoys and on Chinook helicopters, celebrate a job well done and rush back to safer ground in Kabul, the capital, 25 miles northeast.”

The trip from Kabul to Kanda-har is faster now — unless a person gets killed or kidnapped along the way. Andrew Natsios, the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, bragged, “We built this road right through a war zone.” But the road is doing nothing to end the war. Though the road itself is a vast improvement over the horribly potholed road first built by the United States in the 1960s, the Chicago Tribune noted that “all but about 40 miles of it are off-limits to the United Nations agencies and international aid workers” because of the high risk of attacks. The soaring crime rate can make the road too perilous even for Afghan taxi drivers.

Despite the dismal failure of U.S. foreign aid to Afghanistan during the Bush administration, the Obama administration’s promises of redemptive aid are usually taken at face value by most of the American media. Neither the media nor the White House has shown a learning curve.

The blessings of liberty?

Another defense of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan is that it will bring the blessings of freedom to the long-suffering Afghan people. But that is the same charade that the Bush administration used — very successfully for his 2004 reelection campaign.

In a February 5, 2004, speech in Charleston, South Carolina, Bush declared, “Thanks to the United States and our friends, thanks to the bravery of many of our fellow citizens … Afghanistan is a free country.” Bush also asserted that the United States “liberated the … Afghan people from oppression and fear.” But it takes more than the abolition of weekly public executions in the Kabul soccer stadium to make Afghans free. If freeing people were as simple as toppling a bad government, almost all of the people in the world would have long since been free.

Bush’s proclamation that Afghans were free provides more insight into his concept of freedom than it does into the daily sufferings of Afghans at the hands of their government. The U.S. State Department noted in 2004,

Arbitrary arrest and detention are serious problems…. Procedures for taking persons into custody and bringing them to justice followed no established code…. Limits on lengths of pretrial detention were not respected….

… There were credible reports that some detainees were tortured to elicit confessions while awaiting trial.

On the bright side, the State Department noted that “defendants … were permitted attorneys in some instances.”

Unfortunately, the Afghans were receiving the same type of freedom that Bush was creating for Americans. The Afghan government created a National Security Court to try terrorist cases and other cases but did not disclose any details on how the court would actually function. The new court provided the appearance of a judiciary while permitting maximum political manipulation of charges and verdicts. The Karzai government also expanded the number of judges on the Afghan Supreme Court from 9 to 137. Even Franklin Roosevelt’s 1937 scheme to pack the U.S. Supreme Court was timid in comparison.

Freedom has been flattening for some Afghans unlucky enough to live near high-ranking government officials. The State Department reported, “Government forces demolished homes and forcibly removed populations from and around the homes of high government officials and other government facilities, without any judicial review. Police officers, led by Kabul Chief of Police Salangi, destroyed the homes of more than 30 families in Kabul.” The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission has “investigated and registered” hundreds of cases of “police arbitrarily destroying homes.”

Freedom of speech and freedom of press are sparse in many parts of Afghanistan. The government and political forces have a stranglehold on broadcast media and also dominate much of the print media. The State Department noted, “The State owned at least 35 publications and almost all of the electronic news media. All other newspapers were published only sporadically and for the most part were affiliated with different provincial authorities. Some government officials through political party ties maintained their own communications facilities.” Considering the high rate of illiteracy in Afghanistan, the government broadcast media monopoly ensures that few Afghans will hear a discouraging word — at least regarding their rulers.

The Bush administration followed the usual pattern of touting to the heavens meaningless reforms by its foreign lackeys. In 2004, Bush gushed about the provisional constitution recently approved by a meeting of Afghanistan’s Loya Jirga. Bush bragged that “the people of Afghanistan have written a constitution which guarantees free elections, freedom, full participation in government by women. Things are changing. Freedom is powerful.”

But the new Afghan constitution has thus far had about as much effect on the average Afghan as Stalin’s 1936 constitution, which generously proclaimed a panoply of freedoms, had on the typical Soviet citizen. The Afghan constitution is largely a list of positive-sounding aspirations — the type of public relations slogans that Washington lobbies emit all the time for their foreign clients. The new constitution did little more than provide an applause line for Bush’s speeches.

The Obama administration is following in Bush’s footsteps in its portrayal of the Karzai regime as a legitimate elected government. The election last summer in Afghanistan was one of the most corrupt in the world since the fall of the Soviet bloc. But after it became clear that Karzai was not going to budge from power, the Obama administration decided to treat him as if had won fair and square. That was the same folly that the Johnson administration fell into regarding its South Vietnamese lackeys in 1967. But in the same way that the Vietnamese people were not fooled, the Afghan people are increasingly bitter about both Karzai’s abuses and the fact that the United States is sanctioning their oppressor.

There will be no happy ending to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. By vesting himself in one of Bush’s greatest follies, Obama is destroying his credibility both with Americans and with the world. Who will be the last American soldier to die so that the U.S. president can continue denying his Afghan follies?

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003.

It is always touching to see the world’s most powerful military machine portray itself as a “pitiful, helpless giant” (the phrase Nixon used in his speech announcing his illegal invasion of Cambodia).

WikiLeaks is wreaking havoc primarily because the U.S. government has shoveled so much bilge on Afghanistan for the last 9 years.

The easiest way for the US government to reduce WikiLeaks’ impact is to disclose the truth at the time events occur.

But that is practically like asking a king to surrender his sovereign immunity….

Bovard:
National Security letters have already been a complete disaster. The FBI has used those to put the Fourth Amendment through a shredder. We have no idea how many innocent people’s privacy has been violated by that, because there have been some very good inspector general reports, but the actual damage to privacy is far greater, and the government leaves out all the details, so we don’t know what the government did with the information it got. And so the folks in the Obama White House think the answer is to give the FBI a much bigger vacuum cleaner and basically change the law to make it much clearer that the FBI is entitled to far more sweeping information on people’s Internet use, the times and dates they sent email, the subject lines, and also possibly a person’s browser history. So if someone out there clicks on Antiwar.com, that could go on their permanent federal FBI record.

The FBI or perhaps other federal agents or federal agencies, because we don’t really know how much else, how many other laws are being broken right now. It’s been a long time since federal law enforcement was on a leash, and we really don’t know who they’re ravaging. But it’s appalling to see the Obama Administration, “Mr. Constitutional Lawyer,” coming in there and just pushing these things, which are just one more wish list for law enforcement and the intelligence types and one more trampling of privacy. I mean, it is an outrage that these folks want to give more power to the government on this when they have not yet disclosed how the government abused the power it already had.
***

Edit note on the interview transcript: It reads as if I thought I would receive a bonus payment (any payment would have been a bonus) each time I said “I mean” or “you know.”
Geez….

Transcript – Scott Horton interviews James Bovard July 30, 2010

Scott Horton: All right y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m Scott Horton. I’m joined on the phone by my friend Jim Bovard. He’s the author of The Farm Fiasco [9] and The Fair Trade Fraud [10] and Feeling Your Pain [11] and Freedom in Chains [12], Terrorism and Tyranny [13], The Bush Betrayal [14], and Attention Deficit Democracy [3] is so good – it’s a couple of years old now, but still – man what an awesome book, Attention Deficit Democracy [3]. I’m sure I’ve left half of them off the list there, but that’s Jim Bovard’s work. He is the most accomplished libertarian journalist in history and of course he’s a fellow over at the Future of Freedom Foundation [15] as well. Hey Jim, how’s it going man?

James Bovard: Hey, Scott, thanks for having me on the air.

Horton: Well I appreciate you joining us again on the show today.

Bovard: Hey, it was a really great interview that you did yesterday with Julian Assange [16]. It’s great that you guys are putting the transcripts online. You know, I’ve been hearing a lot of stuff in the Washington press corps and the Washington Post about kind of telling you that the release a couple of days ago wasn’t as big as the Pentagon Papers. It’s nice to see from your interview there’s a whole lot more coming, and you know this game is only starting and it’s getting better all the time.

Horton: Well, thanks very much. Two things there: First of all, Angela Keaton gets the credit for producing this show and getting all the guests lined up, like you right now, but like Julian yesterday as well – she gets all the credit for that. And then, secondly, the transcripts are thanks to a small group of volunteers I’ve been able to put together. I think at least some of them have told me not to say their names or whatever, so I guess I won’t say their names, but anyway there are about five people who are working together to put together the transcriptions and then go over them and get them in final draft form for me, and then, as you mentioned, they got that Julian Assange interview transcript together, ready to post in real time with the archive of the audio last night. So I’m very thankful to all of them for that. It’s really something having the transcripts up.

Bovard: Yeah, and it’s so helpful for folks who might not want to listen or folks who are more print oriented, kind of like geezers like myself.

Horton: Well and it’s a matter of time too, you know.

Bovard: That’s true. That’s true.

Horton: You listen to a half-hour interview, you can read it in four minutes, you know?

Bovard: That’s true, and something which is nice about being able to read it is that you can annotate it.

Horton: Right, yeah, copy, paste.

Bovard: And there are certain quotes – like the thing a half an hour ago, I did a blog on your interview, and it was nice to be able to pull out a couple of sentences from his comments and just pop them right in there, so…

Horton: Right, well and you think about some of the things I get, former CIA agents and former National Security Council staffers and other people who will say on the show – a lot of those things could be news stories themselves, and I think now that we’re getting them in print, and especially fast like this, maybe we can get to building some news releases around them. You know, because Flynt Leverett on this show, the things that he says – that’s a news story itself, that this guy Flynt Leverett told this guy Scott Horton X and such.

Bovard: Well, yeah, but the downside to all this is it means you’re going to have more trouble with groupies.

Horton: Yeah! Well that’s always been a real problem around here, believe me.

Bovard: Well, I saw it happen at that Future of Freedom conference. My goodness, you know, it was dangerous standing close to you. You know? I felt like I had to do my middle-linebacker, you know, always be on defense.

Horton: Well, it’s nice to know you have my back, Jim.

Bovard: All right.

Horton: Hey, by the way, when are they doing another one of those Future of Freedom Foundation conferences? That thing was awesome, man.

Bovard: Good question. Don’t know. That’s a good question for Bumper [Future of Freedom Foundation president Jacob Hornberger] next time you talk to him. They’ve been cooking some other stuff up, so I don’t know.

Horton: You know, people go on the YouTube [17] and look – that was in 2007, right?

Bovard: There was one in 2007. There was one in 2008.

Horton: Okay. Well maybe that was the 2008 one. Or maybe – I don’t know. Yeah, I guess that was 2008. So, anyway, go and look at the YouTube y’all, and there are excellent speeches by Ron Paul, and Stephen Kinzer, and Andrew Bacevich, and you’re one of them too, aren’t you?

Bovard: I was one of them. There was Glenn Greenwald…

Horton: Karen Kwiatkowski. Yeah, Greenwald. Anthony Gregory gave a great speech about why it’s immoral to drop high explosives on peoples’ heads from your airplane. Yeah, it was awesome – always is. And of course Jacob’s speech was great too.

Bovard: Yeah, he’s a first-class hell raiser.

Horton: All right. Well, so, we got to cover some news or something important or something, so let’s talk about this WikiLeaks thing. That’s kind of where we started here with the Julian Assange. I’m trying to be hopeful that – and this was going to be one of my questions for him before I ran out of time yesterday, and I don’t know, he doesn’t have any inside information on this, I guess. But what I’m hopeful about, Jim – and I wonder whether you think that this will be the case, is that WikiLeaks will inspire competition, and more people, more computer geniuses with encryption skills and whatever are going to figure out ways to do their own little separate WikiLeaks.

Bovard: That would be great. I mean, as long as there’s some type of quality control. Because I would assume at some point that people inside of the government are going to be trying to feed false information through the different people that are sending information to the various –

Horton: Well, the more the merrier, right?

Bovard: Absolutely.

Horton: I mean that’s where we get our checks and balances in the market. And, well look, as we’ve been discussing, as I think you brought up – yeah, because you’re talking about the Washington Post there and the way that they treat this thing – we have to come up with our own journalism. Ray McGovern [18] yesterday called it the “Fifth Estate” – “the Ether” – and the establishment can’t do nothing about it. It’s the Internet. It’s CampaignForLiberty.com (I’m looking at your article, “The Fraud of ‘Big-Picture’ Thinking [19]” right now). It’s Antiwar.com. It’s WikiLeaks.org and Salon.com/Opinion/Greenwald. And this is the future of journalism in the world.

Bovard: I hope you’re right. I’m not entirely confident the government cannot find some way to sabotage it. I would also – I will be curious to see what they try to do as far as lawsuits; I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in Congress tries to pass a law that would somehow attach liability to people who pass on government confidential documents. I mean, there’s all kinds of peril laying out there, and it was surprising to see some of these liberal mainstream journalists prior to this most recent leak kind of taking shots at WikiLeaks. I mean, it’s almost as if some of the liberals thought that they should be a team player, and I’m thinking, you know, it doesn’t make sense to trust the government to tell us the truth because the government’s had plenty of opportunities and it hasn’t done it.

Horton: Yeah, well, we’re doomed.

Bovard: Well, I don’t know that we’re doomed, but I expect that there’ll be a lot of surprises and tussles coming up here. But it’s very encouraging to hear that those folks have got a lot more surprises in the pipeline, and you know, the thing that’s shocking to a degree is how much the established media – you know, there have been individual journalists who have done a great job in Afghanistan – people like Carlotta Gall for the New York Times and some other folks, but so much of the mainstream press coverage – well, it’s been government-fed, which is why that Rolling Stone story [20] was such a shock. It’s like the evidence was out there, but it was almost as if some of the journalists were bending over backwards not to connect the dots.

Horton: Yeah, well and you’re right. I mean, you do have Carlotta Gall and a lot of other good reporters at the Times and even at the Post and other places, but it’s the narrative that sticks, you know? No matter how many times Carlotta Gall reports about, I don’t know, Pakistani help for the Taliban, or whatever, and it’s the kind of thing that people who are paying attention already know – the narrative really never changes from, whatever, “It’s hard work but we’re making progress – all we got to do is surge some more troops in there and everything will end up going our way.”

Bovard: Well, yeah. I mean there is a fair amount of that. The interesting thing about Gall is she had the first bombshell story [21] on the U.S. use of torture after 9/11, using it there in Afghanistan, but if memory serves [22], the New York Times editors basically sat on the article for a long time and then kind of buried it in the middle of the A section or the front section, and did not give it anywhere near the play. And if the New York Times had not flinched on that, it might have been more difficult for the Bush administration to make an institution of torture in so many different places around the world. And it’s surprising to me that Carlotta Gall has not gotten a lot more credit for what she’s done, because – well, anyhow, that’s another story.

Horton: Well you know when you talk about the Democrats turning on WikiLeaks. I was just looking at Greg Sargent’s blog [23], actually at the Washington Post – Glenn Greenwald [24] had a link over to it – and it’s this Jason Chaffetz, a Republican congressman who voted against the Afghan war funding, is being attacked for betraying the troops by his Democratic opponent. And on down the chain of BS we go, just switching roles back and forth between these two stupid parties.

All right, y’all, it’s Jim Bovard the genius on the show, on the line. We’ll be right back after this.

* * * * *

Horton: All right, y’all. Welcome back to the show, it’s Antiwar Radio, I’m on the phone with former Kelly Girl typist Jim Bovard.

Bovard: [laughs]

Horton: He’s the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [25], it’s really a great book, you guys really ought to read it. I know I sit here and I tell you about all these books you got to read all the time. I can’t even read all the books I got to read, and that’s my job. But this is one that you actually go and get and read, not just hear about: Attention Deficit Democracy [25]. And, yeah, he knows it’s not supposed to be a democracy, it’s just a stupid title.

Bovard: [laughs] Oh thanks, that’s a great plug.

Horton: Yeah, yeah, quote that one on the back of the next one, you know?

Bovard: Sounds good to me.

Horton: All right, so let’s talk about –

Bovard: – Bob Barr has a blurb, but go ahead.

Horton: Oh, yeah, yeah, no doubt. Hey, by the way, did that guy ever give you the money he owed you? Ok, nevermind.

Bovard: Oh, now there’s a question. Things are proceeding on the litigation front.

Horton: Well the guy is a former federal prosecutor, so I don’t expect him to have any honor or anything, but I guess we’ll see how that goes. Well, yeah, and speaking of that, I want to pick on the FBI.

Bovard: Go for it.

Horton: I know they’re one of your favorite government agencies to pick on. These guys – well, two things. First of all, it says that they want to just be able to seize whatever information they want from any ISP in the country without any warrant. But I thought they could already do that, because of the Patriot Act, because of the National Security Letters and administrative subpoenas and so forth, so I was hoping you’d set me straight as to exactly how that works. And then the second thing is, all the cops were cheating on the test about when you’re allowed to seize what – to see whether they’re allowed to be cops in the first place.

Bovard: Well this is – yeah, the second story, the FBI agents probably apparently cheated en masse as far as being able to answer the question about when they’re allowed to do these – seize people’s private information without a warrant, but that’s a harmless error because it works out well for the government. And the second one – front page [26] of the Washington Post today – the Obama administration is pushing to allow the FBI to seize far more personal information about people’s computer use without using a warrant. This is basically a change in the standard which the National Security Letters would be used for.

National Security letters have already been a complete disaster. The FBI has used those to put the Fourth Amendment through a shredder. We have no idea how many innocent people’s privacy has been violated by that, because there have been some very good inspector general reports, but the actual damage to privacy is far greater, and the government leaves out all the details, so we don’t know what the government did with the information it got. And so the folks in the Obama White House think the answer is to give the FBI a much bigger vacuum cleaner and basically change the law to make it much clearer that the FBI is entitled to far more sweeping information on people’s Internet use, the times and dates they sent email, the subject lines, and also possibly a person’s browser history. So if someone out there clicks on Antiwar.com, that could go on their permanent federal FBI record.

Horton: Well look, I think everybody ought to understand already that it does go on their permanent National Security Agency file forever, if not the FBI, at this point.

Bovard: Well, it’s really hard to know – well, you know, sometimes bureaucrats share, and we have no idea how much information is being passed back and forth.

Horton: Right, I mean, that’s the real concern, right? I mean, hell, Jim, if we left it up to the FBI to build the Cray supercomputer to enslave us all, we’ll be free forever, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that you change an “and” to a “to” in some legislation somewhere, and now the National Security Agency’s powers over all of us are available to the cops who actually can use these things in court against us, and the National Security Agency – I guess they could contract out a secret hit with the CIA to kill you or whatever, but they don’t have any police power over us here other than through the FBI.

Bovard: Well, the FBI or perhaps other federal agents or federal agencies, because we don’t really know how much else, how many other laws are being broken right now. It’s been a long time since federal law enforcement was on a leash, and we really don’t know who they’re ravaging. But it’s appalling to see the Obama Administration, “Mr. Constitutional Lawyer,” coming in there and just pushing these things, which are just one more wish list for law enforcement and the intelligence types and one more trampling of privacy. I mean, it is an outrage that these folks want to give more power to the government on this when they have not yet disclosed how the government abused the power it already had.

Horton: And even if you check out the Priest-Arkin version [27] of the national security state in the Post, they’re saying, “It’s out of control.” I think that was the title of the first piece of that last week was “Out of control, National Security State” – no one’s in charge, certainly not elected representatives of anybody.

Bovard: Well and Congress is supposed to have oversight. I would wager heavily that probably less than a third of the members of Congress even read that Washington Post series. Because members of Congress almost never read. I mean, you know, it’s like – well, anyhow.

Horton: Well, you know I’m actually going to interview Barbara Lee later today.

Bovard: Oh good!

Horton: It was supposed to be at the beginning of the show, and that was going to be one of my questions for her, is, “How dim is the average member of Congress?” I mean not even in the sense of, “Do they disagree with me about X, Y or Z?” Lord knows Barbara Lee and I disagree about all kinds of things, I’m sure. But it seems to me like most of these members of congress, Jim – and I know you’ve covered most of them live there at the Capitol – it seems like they don’t even care about stuff. They’re not even interested in what’s going on.

Bovard: Right. Yes. I mean, something that you might want to do with Barbara Lee is ask her what her assessment is of how much the average congressman knows about what the government is doing either in foreign policy or in the surveillance stuff. And ask her if her fellow members of Congress ever read anything about these things, because that might get a very interesting answer.

Horton: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious to listen to these people talk that they’re a tenth as informed as the average reader of Antiwar.com. You could even tell, in the Bush years, there were times where you could tell that George Bush actually knew less than the readers at Antiwar.com. Whatever it was they were telling him didn’t include a lot of the story.

Bovard: Scott, Scott, Scott, this is damning with faint praise as far as your readers –

Horton: Well, no, I don’t mean – I mean what he’d even been briefed on.

Bovard: “Knows more than George W.” I mean, this is something to pat yourself on the back about. It’s like being a Rhodes Scholar these days.

Horton: No, no, you know what I mean, where he’s just talking about – I wish I had a good example, but, you know, going on about Iran and Iraq, and you can tell he really doesn’t know that he’s been fighting for Iran in Iraq for years on end. I mean, most of these guys knew they were lying when they said something like that. Nobody ever even told him, you know? All he had to do was get a laptop and start googling, he’d have found out a lot more than Condoleezza Rice ever let him know.

Bovard: Well, and the thing that’s unfortunate – it was so rare in an interview with Bush that some journalist would ask him a question that would actually test his factual knowledge, because that would tell us a lot more as far as whether he had any clue in Hades as far as what was going on. But the journalists almost never did that. There was a short little Irish lady who interviewed him in the summer of 2004 and Bush just had a snit because she was pushing him on torture, and the White House just about fell apart on that.

Horton: Right, yeah, how dare she? And you know, this is the symptom of the whole larger thing – I hate to even bring this up. But I obviously don’t want to talk about the subject, but it’s an example/side-issue thing – is the upcoming marriage – apparently, I hadn’t read anything but a headline, can’t avoid them – the upcoming marriage of the daughter of two presidents ago. And this is like some kind of like the – when I was a kid and Lady Diana got married to Prince Charles or whatever. I mean, really, I’m supposed to care about Bill Clinton’s daughter? This is news? It’s like we do live in England with this kind of weird pseudoroyalty that they got from Arkansas.

Bovard: Well, yeah, and it’s similar to the British Royalty because it’s fairly inbred.

Horton: [laughs] Yeah, indeed. I always did think that – well, never mind, I’m not going to say it.

Bovard: [laughs] Okay.

Horton: I had something really funny I was going to say, but never mind.

Bovard: Okay, well, we’ll just try to keep up to you.

Horton: It would have been worth that laugh I got out of you.

Bovard: All right, well, you know I was waiting for a zinger.

Horton: Well, yeah, there was a zinger but I stifled it, man.

Bovard: A Bill Hicks cyber zinger – You know, I was looking for some Bill Hicks caliber right there.

Horton: Yeah, no. There’s nothing Bill Hicks caliber here, man. Anyway, we try. Well, so, hey, here’s this too, man, is the Iraq war – you think that’s ever going to end?

Bovard: Well, there’s still quite a few Iraqis alive, so um…

Horton: Yeah, I guess we still got a job to do.

Bovard: Well, and it’s fascinating how the mainstream American media has basically gone with this notion that the U.S. won – and it’s like a hell of a definition of victory.

Horton: And it really has worked – You know Biden here says the headline, “U.S. Troops Halted Chaos and Destruction in Iraq.” They really got away with that. We really live in a world upside down.

Bovard: Well, it almost makes you cynical.

Horton: Yeah, almost – well good thing you’re not yet. Everybody go look at JimBovard.com, would you? And thanks, Jim.

Bovard: Hey, thanks for having me on, Scott.

Horton: We’ll be back.

——————————————————————————–

Article printed from Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette: http://antiwar.com/radio

URL to article: http://antiwar.com/radio/2010/07/30/james-bovard-13/

URLs in this post:

[1] here: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&promoid=BIOW

[2] James Bovard: http://fff.org/aboutUs/bios/jxb.asp

[3] Attention Deficit Democracy: http://www.amazon.com/Attention-Deficit-Democracy-James-Bovard/dp/140397666X/antiwarbookstore

[4] flagrant abuse: http://www.aclu.org/national-security/internal-report-finds-flagrant-national-security-letter-abuse-fbi

[5] even more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/28/AR2010072806141.html

[6] paying its bills: http://www.jimbovard.com/Bob%20Barr%20Lawsuit.htm

[7] MP3 here: http://dissentradio.com/radio/10_07_29_bovard.mp3

[8] many other books: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=james+bovard&x=0&y=0

[9] The Farm Fiasco: http://www.amazon.com/Farm-Fiasco-James-Bovard/dp/1558151141/antiwarbookstore

[10] The Fair Trade Fraud: http://www.amazon.com/Fair-Trade-Fraud-James-Bovard/dp/0312083440/antiwarbookstore

[11] Feeling Your Pain: http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Your-Pain-Government-Clinton-Gore/dp/B000IOET32/antiwarbookstore

[12] Freedom in Chains: http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Chains-State-Demise-Citizen/dp/0312229674/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3

[13] Terrorism and Tyranny: http://www.amazon.com/Terrorism-Tyranny-Trampling-Freedom-Justice/dp/1403966826/antiwarbookstore

[14] The Bush Betrayal: http://www.amazon.com/Bush-Betrayal-James-Bovard/dp/1403968519/antiwarbookstore

[15] Future of Freedom Foundation: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGLL_enUS371US371&q=Future+of+Freedom+Foundation+Bovard&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

[16] Julian Assange: http://antiwar.com/radio../2010/07/28/julian-assange-2/

[17] YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/FutureFreedomF

[18] Ray McGovern: http://antiwar.com/radio../2010/07/28/ray-mcgovern-24/

[19] The Fraud of ‘Big-Picture’ Thinking: http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1037

[20] Rolling Stone story: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236

[21] the first bombshell story: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/04/international/asia/04AFGH.html

[22] serves: http://www.cjr.org/politics/how_well_has_the_press_covered.php

[23] Greg Sargent’s blog: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/07/dear_dems_no_reading_from_rove.html

[24] Glenn Greenwald: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/07/29/change/index.html

[25] Attention Deficit Democracy: http://www.amazon.com/Attention-Deficit-Democracy-James-Bovard/dp/140397666X/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1

[26] front page: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/28/AR2010072806141_pf.html

[27] Priest-Arkin version: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/

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